The Fanatic

Although this was delivered in the same flat monotone, Hardie interpreted it as a joke of some sort and laughed loudly. Maybe it was relief. ‘Brilliant!’ he said, raising his glass. ‘Slàinte.’

Carlin didn’t respond. Jackie Halkit, raising her own drink instinctively, noticed that his glass, which only a couple of minutes ago had been almost full, was now down to the dregs. She hadn’t been aware of him drinking in the interim.

‘So what about the book, Jackie?’ Hardie turned and asked. ‘Is it a project?’

‘If you make it one,’ she said. She was aware of Carlin swivelling on his stool, standing up. Maybe he’s going to buy a round, she thought, and laughed into herself. She dragged her mind back to answering Hugh’s question. ‘As far as I’m concerned, at this point in space and time, no, it isn’t,’ she said.

‘Great,’ said Hardie. ‘It’s inspiring to work with you too.’ For a moment she thought he was angry at her, but then he gave her that winning smile. She had a sudden image of herself, seated in a pub late one afternoon, her consciousness being worked over by two men, both of whom intrigued her though she found them, for different reasons, slightly repellent. She felt she needed to get out in the sunlight.

‘Hey,’ Hugh said, ‘maybe I could get him to write it. Being a historian and everything.’

She brought herself back. ‘Where is he?’ she asked Hugh. Carlin had disappeared.

‘Gone for a slash, I assume,’ said Hugh. But at the end of five minutes, and after Hugh had been on a scouting expedition to the toilet, it became clear that Carlin had left the pub.

‘Fucking marvellous!’ said Hugh. ‘I mean, what’s that all about? Is he going to do it? Did we make arrangements? I don’t even know where the guy lives. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea, Jackie.’

‘Perfect for the part, I think you said. Don’t expect any sympathy from me, you rat. I did try to warn you.’

‘But he is perfect. I really want him scaring the shit out of my tourists. Do you not know where he lives?’

‘No. And I don’t want to either. But you did make arrangements, even if they didn’t seem very definite to you. That’s one of the things I mind about him, you only needed to say something once and it lodged, it stuck there in his head and he never forgot it.

‘One time when I was a student, someone sort of half-suggested we all go for a drink after the last class before we went home for Christmas, in Sandy Bell’s it was supposed to be, but it never came to anything, people just sloped off in different directions muttering cheerios. But then a couple of the girls caught up with me and said, Come on, let’s get pissed, so we did, just the three of us, we hit the Royal Mile and had a right laugh.

‘We all stayed in different flats over in Marchmont, so we were heading that way at the end of the evening and one of them says, Right, in here quick, one for the road before we get raped across the Meadows, and it was Sandy Bell’s, and would you believe it, the bastard was in there, cool as you like, propping up the bar listening to the folkies, and he turns to us and says. Well, I thought yous were never going to show. And we had a round but the fun had gone out of us like balloons, we just all stood around in a circle watching each other drink, him with his eyes on us all the time, and then he walked with us home across the Meadows cause he stayed up in Bruntsfield somewhere. I tell you, we were all that freaked we had to lie we all stayed in the same street cause none of us wanted to be the last one alone with him.’

‘Now that’s scary,’ said Hugh Hardie. ‘Creeps that hang around all night on the basis of a throwaway suggestion. I hate that kind of no-hoper stuff. But you can’t get away from it, he’s an ideal match for Major Weir. They might have been made for each other. So, Heart of Midlothian at eleven, was that what we agreed? Do you think he’ll show?’

‘Unless he’s changed in six years,’ said Jackie. ‘Which I don’t think. Seems to me he just got weirder than he was already. You turn up there on time, I’ll bet he’s waiting on you.’

Their glasses were empty. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got stuff to do tonight.’

‘What stuff?’

‘Lassies’ stuff. You know, cleaning the bath, reducing the ironing pile, that kind of everyday homely stuff.’

‘God. Glad I’m not a lassie. Sure you don’t want another?’

‘No thanks, Hugh. But – and I know this is going to sound pathetically girlie too – what I would appreciate is if you’d just get me down the street a wee bit. I’ve got this feeling about Andrew Carlin. I don’t want him following me home or anything.’

‘Come on,’ said Hardie, looking at his watch. ‘Six o’ clock. It’s kind of early for stalking.’ Then he saw that she wasn’t joking. ‘Yeah, sure, no problem. Where do you stay again?’

‘New Town,’ she said. ‘Just chum me a block or two, if you don’t mind.’

‘I’d chum you all the way,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to have to do some haunting tonight, I guess, so I’d better go home too, get myself organised. The traffic’ll have died down a bit by now, though, I’ll flag you a taxi.’

‘I’ll walk,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine. It’s just – seeing him again.’

Out on the street they had to negotiate past a drunk man coming towards them. He lurched at Hugh, who put a hand out defensively to prevent him falling into his arms. The raincoat slid greasily under his palm.

‘Dae I no ken ye fae somewhere?’ said the drunk man. He looked old; his jaw bristled with sharp white hairs and was shiny wet with slavers.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Hardie, easing him back. He sidestepped to the left but the drunk man miraculously matched his footwork with a neat shuffle and blocked his path again.

‘Let me pit it anither wey. Dae you no ken me fae somewhere?’

Jackie burst out laughing.

‘Whit’s she findin sae bluidy funny?’

‘Nothing,’ said Hugh. ‘Look, I definitely don’t know you.’ The man looked intently up into his face. ‘Why do you think I would know you?’

‘Christ, I don’t know,’ said the drunk man. ‘Thought I’d seen ye before. Thing is, I was kinna hopin ye’d ken me. Cause I don’t have a fuckin clue whae I am.’

This time he moved first, gliding around Hardie’s static figure like a winger of the old school of Scottish football, a wee ugly knot of accidental perfection. He hauled off into the gathering evening, swearing profusely.

Jackie was still smiling when they reached Nicolson Street. ‘It’s okay,’ she told Hugh, ‘I don’t know what got into me. I’ll be fine from here. But thanks anyway’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, see you around. Come on the tour some time.’

I’ll do that,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you.’ Then she was away, across at the lights, still wondering if he’d expect her to pay for a ticket.

Andrew Carlin was the kind of man that might slip between worlds, if such a thing were possible. He inhabited his days like a man in a dream, or like a man in other people’s dreams.

There were three mirrors in Carlin’s place: one in the bathroom, one on the door of an old wardrobe that stood against the wall of the lobby, and one over the fireplace in the front room, which doubled as his bedroom. This was an old, ornately gilt-framed mirror, mottled at the edges, and with a buckle in it that produced a slightly distorting wave in the glass. It was like a mirror that hadn’t had the courage to go the whole bit and join a travelling show, where it could turn those who looked in it into fully-fledged grotesques.

This was the mirror Carlin talked with, mostly. It had once been his mother’s. It was flanked by two heavy brass candlesticks, which he had also inherited from her. In his parents’ house the mirror and the candlesticks had been crammed onto a shelf among the bric-a-brac and debris that his mother couldn’t stop snapping up in charity shops. She would come home laden with bargains and they’d have to eat beans for the rest of the week. When his father died it got worse. From the age of fourteen Carlin missed the dogged, watchful presence that had balanced the magpie frenzy of his mother. The only time he benefited from her obsession was when he first got the flat in Edinburgh, a tiny conversion on the top floor of a tenement in a street that was too near the canal to be really Bruntsfield. It was cheap enough to rent on his own, but came with a minimum of furnishings. She sorted out a few items for him – dishes and jugs and ornamental vases, most of which he sold on to junk shops or returned to charity. His mother never came to see him, so would never miss what he got rid of.

The mirror was one of the things he liked and held onto. When she died some years later and he cleared the house, he put most of what remained to the cowp. The candlesticks, however, he brought back with him and set on either side of the mirror. The three objects seemed to feed off each other, acquiring a new dignity of their own. Now Carlin felt that where they were was where they had always belonged.

He lit the gas fire, warmed his legs against it for a few minutes, then turned the fire down and faced the mirror. He thought of Hardie saying he was like this Major Weir. How the fuck did he know that? He looked and looked to see Weir in the mirror, but he didn’t know what he expected to see. And he thought of Jackie Halkit.

Edinburgh was a village, if you walked around it you saw the same faces all the time. He’d seen her once or twice in the last year, and each time it had been by chance. He’d recognised her, but he’d never made an attempt to speak to her. You didn’t do that. You didn’t go up to folk. If something was going to happen, they would come to you. That was how it worked.

That was how it had worked till now. He’d broken in on her. He tried to imagine her with himself live in her head again. What would she be thinking? But he couldn’t touch how she might be, just couldn’t feel it.

He saw himself standing outside Dawson’s in the late afternoon. It had been light outside and lighter still in there, because the place was full of bright electric bulbs at the bar and over the tables. Carlin preferred the gloom. He liked candlelight and shadows. Between the street and the inside of the pub there hadn’t been much to choose.

Then suddenly, as he stood there, he had been invaded by a sensation so strong that he had had to put out his hand and steady himself with the tips of his fingers on the varnished wooden beading of the pub door. Just a touch to get his balance back. It was as if he had been right on the edge of something. It was like the other feeling he sometimes got, an overwhelming sense of being elsewhere, or that he could reach out and touch things that were long gone.

The past. He could stretch his fingers and feel it, the shape of it. It was like having second sight in reverse. It was like holding an invisible object, both fascinating and disturbing. Or like feeling your way in the dark.

He’d read that seers didn’t like their gift of seeing the future because there was nothing they could do about it. They had visions of horrible accidents, injuries, deaths, and they couldn’t stop them. There was a guy up north, the Black Isle or somewhere, who took the money from people who came to see him and then was rude and abrupt with them. He had no wish to see their future trials and losses, their rotten endings and stupid tragedies. But he could not turn them away. People came to his door every day, desperate to be warned of things that could not be avoided.

The past was like that for Carlin: a hole at the back of his mind through which anything might come.

‘I’ve a bit o work if I want it,’ he said to the mirror.